by Bob Cullen

Golf's big events are generally played on courses named for towns (Augusta, Carnoustie), trees (Oakmont) or geographical features (Pebble Beach, Southern Hills). There are a few played on courses named for apostles (St. Andrews) or the Viking version of heaven (Valhalla). But there is only one major event played on a course named for a golf architect - the Presidents Cup, played in three of its first four iterations on land that was found by, sculpted by and finally named for Robert Trent Jones.

Thus, this year's Presidents Cup will be, in some respects, a memorial to Jones, who died in June on the eve of the U.S. Open, a few days shy of his 94th birthday.

Jones' career spanned virtually all of the history of American golf. Born in England, he emigrated to the United States at the age of six. He started in golf when a classmate in a Rochester public school told him her uncle, the pro at the Country Club of Rochester, was recruiting caddies. That pro was Walter Hagen. A few years later, Jones observed as Donald Ross came to Rochester and laid out Oak Hill. He decided then and there that he would be a course designer. Jones found a benefactor who helped him go to Cornell, where he designed his own curriculum, ranging from hydraulics and drafting to agronomy and horticulture. After college, he apprenticed with the great Canadian architect, Stanley Thompson. Then he set out on his own, and he built a legacy worth eulogizing.

That legacy begins with the roughly 300 golf courses he designed and the 150 others he rebuilt in 47 of America's 50 states and five of the world's continents. Those courses have hosted 20 U.S. Opens, 12 PGA Championships, and 57 other national championships. As many as 20 of them have been listed at one time or another among the best 100 courses in the world. But, more important than the numbers, were the qualitative changes Trent Jones (an appellation he began using to distinguish himself from that other Robert T. Jones Jr.) helped introduce to the craft.

"I think he was the first architect who made the golf course flexible," says his son Rees, who, like brother Robert Trent Jones Jr., has carved out a successful career for himself in course design.

Before World War II, courses were usually designed with one or two small tees. The only accommodation made to women and short hitters was a change in the par. (Many courses had a women's par of 76.) Trent Jones, during World War II, helped the military build grass airstrips. When the war was over, beginning with Peachtree Golf Club in Atlanta, Jones adapted the airstrip design for golf course teeing areas. His tees stretched for unprecedented distances. They could be set way back to challenge long hitters. They could be pushed far forward to accommodate less powerful players. That idea helped accommodate the wave of new golfers, of both sexes, who took up the game in the prosperity of the 1950s and '60s.

Later in his career, Jones modified the airstrip look, opting instead for sets of four or five tees placed at varying distances from the beginning of each fairway. By then, though, the principle that tee placement should vary as widely as golfers' skills had been firmly implanted in course design.

On the opposite end of his golf holes, Jones altered the characteristic look of American green complexes by the way he used water. In the pre-World War II period, designers like Donald Ross had tended to use water as they had seen it used on the links of their native Scotland. They preferred brooks and creeks to lakes and ponds, since the narrow "burn" was the classic water hazard on the links. And, since they believed in graduated penalties, they tended to place their greens a good distance from the water's edge. They thought only a miserable shot deserved the severe sanction of a full penalty stroke. They preferred to use sand bunkers to punish shots that were only marginally off line.

At mid-century, when Jones became the premier American golf architect, the sand-wedge had come into widespread use. Getting up and down from a greenside bunker had become routine for elite players. Jones, a stern defender of par, responded by putting water hazards flush against putting surfaces.

The first and most famous model of his work along these lines was number 16 at Augusta, which he redesigned. He reshaped the existing creek into a pond that straddles or flanks the entire line of play. Shots hit short or pulled left there now earn a full stroke penalty.

Jones reshaped other holes in similar ways, not always to the satisfaction of club members accustomed to less dicey shots. One of the most famous was the fourth at Baltusrol in New Jersey, which he transformed from a 120-yard pitch to a 192-yard shot over a stone-walled pond that extended to the front edge of the green. Some of the members complained, and Jones, who was an expert player, came out to test the playability of the hole with them.

He borrowed a 4-iron and hit from the members' tees, 165 yards away. The ball rolled into the hole for an ace. "Gentlemen, the hole is fair, eminently fair," Jones declared.

Jones favored large greens, and he designed them with four-round stroke-play championships in mind, rather than match-play. His greens tended to have at least four distinct cupping areas, one for each day of tournament play - they often look on an outline map a little like shamrocks. The cupping areas were often separated by humps or tiers. A player standing in a Jones fairway needed to think carefully about club selection and the line of attack. If he wanted a birdie, or even a reasonable chance at a two-putt par, he had to hit not just the green, but the correct portion of the green.

Jones favored wide fairways. But, characteristically, he tightened them with tiered bunkers on both sides, so that both long and medium hitters had to consider their risk. He tended to design fairway bunkers so that a good player could still reach the green. That was what happened in the 1994 Presidents Cup when Fred Couples clinched a critical singles point for the United States with a 9-iron from a bunker in the 18th fairway that stopped a foot or so from the hole for a conceded birdie.

More than with any single element of his design philosophy, though, Jones carved a prominent niche in the history of American golf by defending par against the livelier balls, more powerful clubs and stronger players of the modern era. He did this, most noticeably, in the makeovers he performed on classic courses that needed updating to stay in the U.S. Open rota. The first of these was Oakland Hills, outside Detroit, a Ross layout. Hired to revise the course prior to the 1951 U.S. Open, Jones retained Ross' greens contours. But he filled in the bunkers that Ross had placed 200 to 220 yards from the tees, adding many new ones from 230 to 260 yards out, thereby often severely pinching the driving zone. Then he tightened the approaches with more bunkers.

Jones' redesign confounded nearly all of the best players of the day. They played short of the tight fairway bunkers, leaving long approach shots that caromed off the greens. Scores soared. The eventual winner was Ben Hogan at 287, seven over par. Hogan fired a brilliant 67 in the final round to win. When it was over, he said, "I'm glad I brought the monster to its knees."

That comment, as much as anything else, certified Jones as the successor to Ross and Alister Mackenzie as the preeminent architect in American golf. The U.S. Golf Association liked the way he had redone Oakland Hills, liked the way he put into practice his guiding principle of "hard par, easy bogey." It became standard practice for clubs hosting national champion- ships to retain Jones to toughen up their layouts. He became known as "The Open doctor."

That fame enabled Jones to alter the stature of golf course architecture. Sometime in the late 1950s or early '60s, Jones was in Europe and visited a Belgian art museum. His son, Robert Trent Jones Jr., remembers that his father was impressed by the distinctive signatures the old masters applied to their paintings. His son Rees remembers that his father also liked his own penmanship.

Shortly after Jones returned from Europe, new ads began appearing in a now-defunct publication called Golfdom where Jones offered his services as a golf architect. "Give your course a signature," the ads said. And, at the bottom, he signed his name.

"That's how the concept of a signature course came about, back in the '60s," Rees Jones recalls. "He started the whole trend of signature design, way before the Tommy Hilfigers. He did for golf course designers what Walter Hagen did for golf professionals. He made it a profession."

Jones, as Mackenzie had before him, became an international architect. Beginning with Sotogrande in Spain, he designed courses from Japan to Morocco, where he did the Royal Rabat Dar es Salaam Golf Club for the pleasure of King Hassan II and his guests. He also designed Pevero in Sardinia for the Agha Khan. He laid out a three-tee practice hole at Camp David for President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Jones turned architecture into an enterprise in ways that Ross and Mackenzie never did. A favorite Jones practice was to buy up a promising piece of land in an area that he foresaw would be ripe for a new golf course. He would find investors. Then he would sell them the land and his design services in a single package.

Some parcels of land took longer to find investors than others. That occasionally distressed Ione Davis Jones, his wife, who kept the accounts. She watched the money go out for land and wondered when some money would start coming back. "My mother used to call my father a landaholic," son Robert Trent Jones Jr. remembers.

That was the origin of the course on which this year's Presidents Cup will be contested. The city of Manassas, VA, built a reservoir called Lake Manassas around 1970. Some time later, flying over the area, Robert Trent Jones noticed that the newly created shoreline had the sort of topography that he knew could make for a fine golf course. He bought several hundred acres.

A few years later, he assembled a group of investors and sold them on the idea that the nation's capital needed a new golf club of international stature. The investors were so taken with Jones that they decided not only to commission him to design the course, but to name the club after him, reasoning that the name would help distinguish the new venture.

The course that Trent Jones produced displays all of the principles he tried to incorporate into his designs. The first hole is a typical example of a strategic par 4. It's a gentle dogleg right to a green with a couple of severe slopes. The hole offers three options off the tee. Players may play a short tee shot that avoids the big fairway bunker on the right; they can try to fade a tee shot down the fairway past the bunker; or they can aim at the bunker and try to carry it. The first option carries little risk but leaves a long second shot to a green that must be hit precisely to assure a routine two-putt; the second option is more dangerous, but promises a shorter shot to the green; the third option requires a long, powerful tee shot, but a player who produces one is rewarded with a wedge to the green and a good chance at a birdie. There are heroic holes, like the par-5 14th, which can be reached with two long, well-played and risky shots. And there are occasional penal holes, like the 11th, where a shot that falls just a couple of yards short of the green will trickle down a slope into Lake Manassas.

Robert Trent Jones Golf Club became one of three golf properties to bear his name. The second was the university golf course at Cornell. And the third was the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail, a complex of 18 public courses stretching the length of Alabama, owned by the state's teachers' retirement fund. Opened in 1993, the trail has been credited with adding a new and successful branch to Alabama's tourism industry; the concept is now being copied by other states.

Jones' sons see these courses as fitting capstones to their father's career. The Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail, bringing quality golf to daily-fee players in a new area, speaks of his interest in democratizing and popularizing the game. Robert Trent Jones Golf Club and the President's Cup speak to his devotion to defending par against the best players, and to his interest in creating international champion- ship venues.

"He was delighted and flattered," his son Bobby remembers, "to have it named after him."